


Broken Heart Still Beating

by Quinnavyre



Category: Bomb Girls
Genre: Angst, F/F, Past non-graphic child abuse, Past non-graphic torture, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 08:55:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2018898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quinnavyre/pseuds/Quinnavyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The old Kate felt and so she sang. The new Kate has no songs. She's just empty and guilty and fearful and unrepentant and so painfully relieved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Heart Still Beating

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for past non-graphic reference to child abuse/torture. Set at the beginning of season 2.

Kate moves across the corridor to her old room as soon as it's vacated. It feels simultaneously strange and familiar. It's lacking most of her belongings, but the wallpaper hasn't changed, and the record player and records are back. Betty must have kept them safe. Marion couldn't have taken them, not with her father's disapproval of romantic secular music, but she couldn't bring herself to destroy them either, so she'd left them behind. They're like old friends, but she can feel them judging her.

She hasn't touched a record since she returned.

She doesn't sing anymore, either.

The old Marion sang to feel.

The old Kate felt and so she sang.

The new Marion sang for a lie.

The new Kate has no songs. She's just empty and guilty and fearful and unrepentant and so painfully relieved.

It would be better to feel nothing.

She's happy to be back with Betty and her other new friends, but that hurts too. Her happiness makes her feel guilty. Her father is dead and only God knows where her mother is. She's worried about her mother's health and whereabouts, but she can't do anything yet. She has to wait until the police stop looking, and then she'll go back to the trailer and look for clues.

Clues makes her think of Gladys, and Kate feels a different kind of guilt. They can't tell Gladys anything because then they would need to tell her everything, and Kate just can't do that. Gladys has been just as sweet and affectionate as ever, but Kate knows she can sense her withdrawal. Her secrets. So many more secrets.

*****

Kate's so afraid now, all the time. Terrified her father wasn't dead then terrified he was. Terrified that they'll be caught. Afraid that she has nowhere and nothing. But she has Betty. She's happy to be with Betty again, although that tears her up inside too, in the moments when she isn't weighed down with guilt and self-loathing. Betty helped her save herself. They're a new family reunited by death and secrets. Kate finds it easier to ignore what happened before she returned to her father. Betty's with Ivan now.

Kate lied for Betty. She ought to feel guilty, but there's only so much room in her body for guilt. She doesn't want to talk to Betty about her main cause for guilt; she's not sure she'd understand. Betty's father was probably a good man. Kate's father was a man of God; she should be able to love him and grieve him. She should feel something.

Kate has other dreams, too. Betty is in them. She's not the seductress Kate's father believed she was.

She's just herself.

Kate almost manages to convince herself that she misunderstood Betty's attentions, that the blonde only meant that she loved Kate as a friend, that the kiss had been intended to hit her cheek.

It doesn't quite work.

She tells herself that how Betty is is wrong, that it's perverted and disgusting, but she can't help the joy she feels when she sees her. It doesn't mean anything, she tells herself, letting herself believe that it's just friendship that she feels. She really likes Betty, but she's not like that. She can't be. The thought twists her gut as she gasps for air reflexively, the memory of her father holding her under the bathwater vivid in her mind. She can't want this. It's wrong. She's wrong, sinful, even thinking these things, remembering Betty's lips on hers.

No, she can't want this.

Kate can't understand why Betty still cares. She doesn't want her affections, but knowing that Betty is still there heals her a little, even while it twists the knife deeper. Kate doesn't deserve friends; she only hurts them. She's damaged. She lies, and sins. Kate is confused by Betty. She is with Ivan, but always comes back to Kate. Why would anyone want her messing up their life?

Kate tries to get answers from Betty, even if she's not sure what she's hoping to hear.

Betty's answers vary between declaring that she really likes Ivan (she almost manages to conceal her wince) to declaring that she feels nothing for him - he's just a distraction - but she always seems to be holding back the one thing Kate almost wants to hear. She starts, but never finishes.

Betty sounds like a broken record. Kate used to think that there was nothing sadder than a record that couldn't play. It was like a bird stuck in a cage. But then Kate became that bird, stuck in her gilded cage on wheels. She used to know what happiness was; now she just looks at Betty and wonders what happened to them both.

We're both broken records now, Kate thinks. Your words will never come, and I will never sing again.


End file.
